Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald

The photograph above, which was taken
at the Ohrdruf forced labor camp, is a copy of the one that hangs
in front of the elevator door at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, DC. It is the first thing that visitors to the
Museum see as they step out of the elevator and enter the first
exhibit room. This is what the American soldiers first saw when
they liberated Germany from the Nazis.

The photo shows a pyre made of railroad
tracks where the bodies of prisoners who had died at Ohrdruf
were burned. Ohrdruf was a small sub-camp of Buchenwald and it
did not have a crematorium with ovens to dispose of the bodies.

Survivors told Eisenhower
prisoners were hung with piano wire

The photo above shows General Dwight
D. Eisenhower viewing the gallows at Ohrdruf. Standing to the
left of the general, and partially hidden by a pole, is Captain
Alois Liethen, who was General Eisenhower's interpreter. The
two men on Eisenhower's right are survivors who are explaining
the atrocities committed in the camp. The Ohrdruf camp was unique
in that prisoners were hanged there with piano wire, rather than
with rope, according to the survivors. An identical gallows was
found at the Buchenwald main camp, where prisoners were hanged
with rope.

The man on the far left, wearing a jacket
and a scarf, is one of the survivors who served as a guide for
General Eisenhower and his entourage. The next day the guide
was "killed by some of the inmates," General Patton
wrote in his memoirs, explaining that the guide "was not
a prisoner at all, but one of the executioners."

A. C. Boyd, a soldier in the 89th Infantry
Division was at Ohrdruf on the day that this man was killed.
In a news article in The Gadsden Times, Jimmy
Smothers wrote the following:

Boyd said he saw a Nazi guard, who
had not fled with the others, trying to exit the camp. One of
the prisoners, who still had a little strength, ran to a truck,
got a tire iron and killed him.

"I witnessed that and saw that
no one tried to stop him," Boyd said.

In a letter dated April 15, 1945, addressed
to Ike (General Dwight D. Eisenhower), Patton wrote the following
regarding the man who had served as their guide at Ohrdruf:

It may interest you to know that the
very talkative, alleged former member of the murder camp was
recognized by a Russian prisoner as a former guard. The prisoner
beat his brains out with a rock.

This prisoner was probably one of the
Kapos in the camp whose job had been to assist the German guards;
it is doubtful that an SS soldier would have remained behind
when the camp was evacuated, knowing that the prisoners would
exact revenge as soon as the Americans arrived. If any SS men
had remained in the camp, they would have been promptly killed
or taken into custody on April 4, 1945 when the camp was first
discovered by American troops. It has been alleged that some
of the SS men at the concenration camps tried to disguise themselves
by putting on civilian clothes or prison garb when the American
troops approached, but the prisoners beat them to death after
the camps were liberated.

Note that General Patton referred to
Ohrdruf as a "murder camp" in his letter. It is clear
from Patton's letters and his memoir that he did not have a clear
understanding of the purpose of the concentration camps and labor
camps because he believed everything that the prisoners told
him. Captain Alois Liethen also believed the stories told by
the survivors, for example, the allegation that prisoners at
Ohrdruf were whipped for the slightest infraction of the rules,
although in 1942, long before the Ohrdruf camp was in existence,
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had forbidden the SS men
to strike the prisoners.

Captain Alois Liethen wrote the following
in a letter to his family, dated 13 April 1945, the day after
he served as the interpreter on the tour of Ohrdruf:

The treatment of the prisoners was
something that even amazed me. If anyone dared to even as much
as smile in ranks he received 25 lashes with a heavy oak staff
while he was bent over nearly double over a whipping post, anyone
who tried to escape was hanged -- not by a rope but by a wire
from a gibbet -- all of the inmates had to witness these hangings
even tho they were sick or feeble. When they were out on a work
detail -- which they were every day from daylight to darkness
they were beaten if they didn't produce as fast as they should,
and then in many cases when the whims of the guards arose to
the occasion they would shoot at them just for the pure fun of
it -- those that ducked were surely doomed for then they were
a sure target for the second shot. Then to come to the matter
of food. Each man received 300 grams of bread (black sour hard
stuff) and 1 liter of soup, of course there were those who performed
those special duties such as the one that I spoke to mostly --
he was on the burning and burying detail -- he got 500 grams
of bread and 2 liters of soup perday (sic). They were kept very
busy for there were estimated that there were 200 to 250 buried
or burned every week.

In the photo below, note the guide, in
the center of the picture, who is walking beside the generals,
telling them about the atrocities in the camp. This is the man
who was killed by the other survivors the next day, according
to General Patton. The man who is leading the walk around the
bodies is Captain Liethen, the interpreter for the group.

American Generals view
dead bodies left out for a week

The Ohrdruf-Nord camp had been discovered
by the 4th Armored Division more than a week before the generals'
visit, but everything had been left intact because General Walker
and General Middleton had ordered that as many soldiers as possible
should be brought there to view the horrible scene. The bodies
were left out until at least the first week of May, so that visiting
soldiers could pose beside them.

In May 1945, this US
soldier posed with bodies left out since April 2, 1945

The photo below shows the townspeople
from Ohrdruf as they are forced to view the bodies found in the
camp. General Walker had ordered that the mayor of Ohrdruf and
his wife should be brought to the camp to see the display of
corpses. After seeing the horror, they went back home and killed
themselves.

German civilians forced
to view the bodies in an Ohrdruf barrack

General Patton wrote that he suggested
that the rest of the inhabitants of Ohrdruf be brought to the
camp the next day, and that the army had "used the same
system in having the inhabitants of Weimar go through the even
larger slave camp (Buchenwald) north of that town." German
civilians were brought from the town of Ohrdruf to exhume the
bodies in the mass grave and bury them again in individual graves.

Civilians from town
of Ohrdruf were forced to view the bodies

Regarding the Ohrdruf-Nord camp, General
Patton wrote the following in his diary:

It was the most appalling sight imaginable.
In a shed . . . was a pile of about 40 completely naked human
bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly
sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them,
but for the purpose of removing the stench.

When the shed was full--I presume
its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit
a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed
that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had
died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January.

A typhus epidemic had started in Germany
in December 1944 and had quickly spread to all the camps as prisoners
were transferred from one camp to another. Half of all the prisoners
who died in the German camps died between December 1944 and the
end of June 1945. Yet the survivors of Ohrdruf claimed that all
the bodies found at the camp were those of prisoners who had
been deliberately killed or starved to death.

It would be hard to find a German town,
however small or obscure, that is completely lacking in historic
or cultural importance. After describing the crimes of the Germans
in his autobiography, General Patton went on to tell about how
the Americans wantonly destroyed every village and hamlet in
their path. On the same page of his book, in which he describes
the atrocities of the Germans, Patton wrote the following:

We developed later a system known
as the 'Third Army War Memorial Project' by which we always fired
a few salvos into every town we approached, before even asking
for surrender. The object of this was to let the inhabitants
have something to show to future generations of Germans by way
of proof that the Third Army had passed that way.

Robert Abzug wrote the following in his
book entitled "Inside the Vicious Heart":

Soon after seeing Ohrdruf, Eisenhower
ordered every unit near by that was not in the front lines to
tour Ohrdruf: "We are told that the American soldier does
not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know
what he is fighting against.'" Eisenhower felt it was essential
not only for his troops to see for themselves, but for the world
to know about conditions at Ohrdruf and other camps. From Third
Army headquarters, he cabled London and Washington, urging delegations
of officials and newsmen to be eye-witnesses to the camps. The
message to Washington read: 'We are constantly finding German
camps in which they have placed political prisoners where unspeakable
conditions exist. From my own personal observation, I can state
unequivocally that all written statements up to now do not paint
the full horrors."

The following quote is from an article
copyrighted in 2004 on the Eisenhower Memorial Commission web
site www.eisenhowermemorial.org/stories/death-camps.htm

As Supreme Commander of the Allied
Expeditionary Forces in World War II, General Eisenhower had
been given information about the Nazi concentration camp system
well before he led the invasion to liberate Western Europe (June,
1944). Reports on the massive genocide inflicted on Jews, Gypsies,
political prisoners, homosexuals, dissidents, and other groups
by the Schutzstaffel (SS) had been circulated among all the Allied
leaders. Very few of the Allied commanders, however, had an accurate
conception of what is now known to the world as the Holocaust
until their troops began to encounter the death camps as they
marched into Western Germany.

On April 4, 1945, elements of the
United States Army's 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored
Division captured the Ohrdruf concentration camp outside the
town of Gotha in south central Germany. Although the Americans
didn't know it at the time, Ohrdruf was one of several sub-camps
serving the Buchenwald extermination camp, which was close to
the city of Weimar several miles north of Gotha. Ohrdruf was
a holding facility for over 11,000 prisoners on their way to
the gas chambers and crematoria at Buchenwald.

Contrary to the information given by
the Eisenhower Memorial Commision, which is quoted above, Ohrdruf
was a forced labor camp, not "a holding facility" for
prisoners on the way to the gas chambers. Buchenwald was one
of the few camps in the Nazi system that did not have a gas chamber.